Last week, Theresa May triggered a general election after denying she planned to do so. That’s the latest in a long list of lies from the Prime Minister, but that’s another story entirely. On June 8th, the country will go to the polls to decide a new Government for this country, and decide whether they want the Christian that doesn’t seem to really give a damn about other people like her religion says she should, or a man who means well but doesn’t have practical experience of running in positions of power having spent almost the entirety of his political life on the back benches.

The events of the last few days have thrown Labour into massive disarray, with MP Naz Shah being suspended over comments made on social media before she was an MP, and for which she apologised. This has been followed with Red Ken Livingstone leaping to her defence on BBC Daily Politics, using ill-advised words about Hitler being a Zionist “before he went mad”. Now, it is well-known that Red Ken is a highly divisive character, or at least it should be after previous faux-pas such as describing a donation to Dan Jarvis as like “Jimmy Savile funding a children’s party”, or comparing a journalist with a “Concentration Camp guard”. But the reaction to this furore is way overboard for what is essentially foot-in-mouth from both.

Righto then, not blogged in a while, but given the seemingly worrying state of attitudes in our country, I think it’s about time I joined in. Over the past few weeks, Channel 4 and Channel 5 have both been stirring the festering pot of hate that the right-wing press are aiming at people who claim benefits – anyone would think it was their fault the economy is shot to buggery…

I’m not a prolific blogger, but every now and then a story arises that either piques my interest, or just gets the outrage flowing. Usually it’s the Daily Mail that is causing this outrage, as bile and hate flows (in my opinion) from its insidious pages. Over the past week, the story has been about the father of Ed Miliband and how he apparently “hated” Britain. Ralph Miliband’s crime, in the eyes of the Daily Mail as far as I can see, was to reject the capitalist political landscape being created post-war in favour of a more Marxist socialist future. Whether you agree with his politics or not, so far there’s not really anything that suggests he hated this country – the country he fled to when he feared persecution by Nazi Germany, let’s not forget. A diary entry, written when he was 16 (hardly a time to be judging people on their beliefs – I didn’t like tennis when I was 16…), states

“The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world… When you hear the English talk of this war you sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how things are.”

Yesterday afternoon, Private Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing top secret videos and memos of US forces’ illegal behaviour to Wikileaks (with Julian Assange currently sweating it out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London). Currently, Edward Snowden, a former CIA and NSA operative, is in hiding in Russia after releasing details of PRISM, an NSA program that is designed to monitor web usage of American citizens, alongside programs used to monitor US and European telecommunications data.